"Saturnalia of Blood": Masculine Self-Control and American Indians in the Frontier Novel

"SATURNALIA OF BLOOD": MASCULINE SELF-CONTROL AND AMERICAN INDIANS IN THE FRONTIER NOVEL Michaei T. Wiison Appalachian State University American novelists of the early nineteenth century inclined to use the Indian as a literary motif found themselves in a quandary regarding two of the primary cultural projects of the day, the emphasis placed on civilized masculine self-control versus the "need" to expand the western frontier and eliminate the Indian presence there. In an era that increasingly stressed the need for masculine self-control in order to focus passions like anger into socially productive channels, how could the violence of the white westward expansion be reconciled ? How did violence, the ideal of masculine self-control, ethnic stereotyping, and the expansion of the western frontier interact as societal issues in order to question or reinforce the existing social order and masculine identity? It was a rhetorical and practical task that occupied politicians, clergymen, and writers alike. The three novels examined in this essay, James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826), William Gilmore Simms's The Yemassee: A Romance ofCarolina (1835), and Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick ofthe Woods: Or TheJibbenainosay, A Tale ofKentucky(1837), each offered a unique solution to this problem.1 By the 1830s, the process ofAmerican Indian extermination, pacification , or removal was well into its second century, although the remaining Indian populations had arguably represented no significant threat to white settlers on any non-local level since King Phillip's War in 1675-76. As Richard Slotkin observes, however, the trope ofa "savage war" with the American Indians was integral to both the project of American western expansion and the concurrent as well as subsequent mythology of the Frontier.2 White novelists during this period like Cooper, Simms, and Bird found themselves with the task of fictionalizing —depicting, reconciling, justifying—the violence with which that "savage war" was being waged. On the surface, the novelists were in agreement about the nature of Indian violence and self-control. In Mohicans, the hostile Indians are "like vultures who were only kept from swooping on their prey by the presence and restraint of a superior army" (17). For The Yemassee, "the Indian upon whom you would most rely would be the very first to strip your scalp as a choice trimming for your moccasin [sic]" (125). 132Michael T. Wilson Nick ofthe Woods concurs: they are "creatures . . . who will think no more of taking the scalps of thee two poor women than of digging off thee own [male scalps]" (135). It is no coincidence that each of these passages points to a central white criticism of Indian "nature": Indians' alleged lack of masculine self-control. "Whites," as Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. has noted, "primarily understood the Indian as an antithesis to themselves," and nothing was more central to the cultural matrix of beliefs that justified continued white dominance in American civilization than the ideal of proper masculine self-control.3 The antithetical nature of Indian men in particular was in many ways both appealing on an individual level to white men struggling with the new "feminized" restrictions on manhood , and culturally threatening to the geographical ambitions of the new Republic. Paul Gilmore has argued that eastern American theater , far away from the western frontier of expansion, presented Indian masculinity as a direct and attractively exoticized contrast to the increasing emphasis on self-controlled white manhood, producing "blacks and Indians simultaneously as primitive embodiments of unruly masculine behavior and as safe, sentimentalized commodities for a feminist middle-class audience. ... In the 1820s and 1830s, Indian melodrama tended to display Indians as noble, stoic, and naturally independent, often celebrating their savage manliness, while narrating their tragic, but necessary, disappearance."4 The solution was to allow white men the opportunity to "play Indian," as these three novels illustrate with their protagonists out-Indianing the Indians in terms of woodcraft and manliness.5 The "savage manliness" celebrated in some Indian melodramas, however, also illustrated the supposed difficulties of Indian-white cohabitation . The "necessity" of their disappearance was primarily justified by emphasizing that "bad" Indian vices—"nakedness and lechery. . . . constant warfare and fiendish revenge against their enemies . . . indolence rather than industry, [and] thievery and...